Washington ? Americans who have been treated to the lowest interest rates in 40 years on home mortgages and many other types of loans should be able to take advantage of those low rates at least until summer, private economists said Monday.

They pointed to turbulence on Wall Street over rising worries about a war with Iraq as a primary reason the Federal Reserve will leave interest rates at a 41-year low.

The Fed’s top policy-making group, the Federal Open Market Committee, will have a two-day meeting today and Wednesday to decide what it should do about interest rates. For more than a year, the central bank has kept those rates at the lowest levels since the early 1960s.

In advance of this week’s discussions, most economists were expecting no change in the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge on overnight loans. The Fed pushed that rate down by a half-point to 1.25 percent on Nov. 6.

“It’s almost a slam dunk that the Fed will leave rates unchanged,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh.

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and other Fed officials have used the phrase “soft spot,” to describe a renewed period of economic weakness that many analysts believe pushed overall growth down to an anemic rate of 1 percent or less in the final three months of 2002.

The Fed’s bigger-than-expected half-point rate reduction in November was an effort to make sure the slowdown did not deepen into something worse, such as a double-dip recession.

Many analysts said the Fed’s actions this year will be more heavily influenced by the course of any war with Iraq than what Congress does with Bush’s stimulus package.

If the United States invades Iraq and the war is over quickly, the Fed likely will remain on the sidelines until the fall, when it is expected to begin raising interest rates.

Many analysts believe 30-year mortgage rates could very well stay close to the 40-year low of 5.85 percent set earlier this month, and banks’ prime lending rate remaining at 4.25 percent.